


we share our mother's health

by tigrrmilk



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Misery, New York, World War II, love during wartime, so much backstory, so much war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-09
Updated: 2014-04-09
Packaged: 2018-01-18 19:56:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1440859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I didn’t ask for you to do this,” Steve says, as he cleans Bucky’s back, a few minutes before Steve’s mother will come in and take over. And no, this, this is the most offended Bucky has ever been, because he knows, and nobody needs to tell him what he should or shouldn’t do because he knows, he’s always known.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we share our mother's health

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [От одной матери](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2213805) by [Taytao](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Taytao/pseuds/Taytao)



> thank you to [connaissais](http://archiveofourown.org/users/connaissais) for the help with editing this, and to EVERYONE ELSE I KNOW for letting me go on and on and endlessly on at them about this for the past few days. thanks morgan, hazel, rachel, and everyone on twitter.
> 
> warnings: there are some brief references to torture, and the aftermath of some violence between children comes up.

 

 

 

 

 

This means we are looking into mirrors of errors.

This means we require each other's tenderness.

**\-- Marianne Morris, _from_ 'Untitled'**

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bucky doesn’t remember the first time he meets Steve because he is a month old and Steve is a year older, and Steve’s mother has to work else neither Steve or she will get to eat, but neither of the babies knows this yet. He wraps his fist around Steve’s wrist and stays like that until he starts screaming, and then Steve cries too.

 

***

 

Steve starts school a year before Bucky does, and it’s the first time that Steve goes somewhere Bucky can’t follow. He doesn’t know this yet, just that Steve’s mother rarely has to bring him over anymore.

Sometimes, though. Steve is barely taller than Bucky and not as heavy, and when he doesn’t go to school he comes over and lies on the couch. There’s a hole in his shoe, and Bucky wants to put his finger in it but he doesn’t.

 

***

 

Bucky’s mother knows Steve’s mother because they’d been pregnant at the same time and their husbands were both at war. They lived in the same building then. Bucky’s mother wasn’t pregnant with him, of course, but with his older sister, a sister he never knew because she died three days after she was born.

Steve didn’t die but his father did, and then Bucky’s father came home and nine months later Bucky was born, and this is where they are now.

 

***

 

Bucky’s mother is from the north coast of Ireland, and she speaks differently to Steve’s mother, who was born in Brooklyn, just like Steve and Bucky were. Bucky’s dad is from somewhere but Bucky doesn’t really know what he sounds like because if he’s not at work he’s with the union, and when he’s not with the union he’s probably sleeping it off.

Bucky and Steve practice their best impressions of Bucky’s mother, and she smiles slightly sadly, and when Bucky speaks as himself he sounds like nothing so much as he sounds like Steve.

 

***

 

It doesn’t occur to Bucky until he’s being sent off to war himself how young his dad had been when he’d done the same. He’d enlisted on his 18th birthday, got married in his uniform, and shipped off back to Europe, where he’d already spent half of his life.

Steve’s father had been 15 years older than Bucky’s father when he’d shipped out and he hadn’t come back, and Bucky’s father had made it back home but wished he hadn’t. Bucky has never quite been able to bring himself to wish the same, no matter how much his father tried in those years between his wars; Bucky likes being alive, but he guesses you can’t expect everyone to feel the same way.

 

***

 

Before Bucky’s war, his father ships out again. There’s a boat going out from New York to Spain to fight for the Republic, and he’s on it for a day before his family know he’s gone.

Bucky’s mother tears up the letter and cries furiously, and it’s the only time he remembers seeing her cry, although he supposes it must have happened before.

Steve’s parents are both already dead, of course, and now they’re down to one between them, because Bucky’s father never comes home, and they knew he wouldn’t from the moment the letter arrived. He’d missed his first chance, but he didn’t miss his second.

He’s not yet 40 when he dies, but it still seems old enough to Bucky and Steve. It doesn’t seem that way forever. Bucky’s 18 and has a job in a pharmacy, but he takes on his father’s abandoned job at the docks the day after he leaves, and Steve takes on Bucky’s old job and draws romance comics for a third-rate publisher in the evenings because nobody will let him draw anything else and a job at the docks would kill him, and they live in Bucky’s apartment until his mother gives up and moves back with her folks on the other side of Brooklyn (and then, two years later, back to Ireland) and then they rent their own room in a tenement with no running water and two small beds pushed together in winter and on nights when Steve is having trouble breathing; but they’ve both been whittled down and down until they only had what they needed most, they cut out all the fat and the flesh and the blood, and they could do without everything without caring until they hit on this, the two of them, and it was bone.

 

***

 

Steve has whooping cough and almost dies but he doesn't. He spends so long in bed, almost-dying, that he has to redo the third grade, and it’s then that Bucky really catches up with him. Bucky is taller than Steve by the time he’s nine, and Steve doesn’t overtake him again until they’re both old enough that they should have stopped growing, and they would have, they had, except.

That’s the year Bucky’s mother asks him to look out for Steve, and he’s never been so offended.

Steve’s mother asks him not to drag her son into any of his trouble, and he’s not offended, because he’s got a split lip and a bruise on his cheek and she’s standing in her doorway and she’s not letting him in to see Steve because he’s taking a nap, and he looks down at his shoes and pokes a toe out through a new hole in the side, and he knows that he’s just been following Steve but she doesn’t know that, and maybe she’s right, anyway, and Bucky goes home and doesn’t speak to Steve until the next day at school when Steve asks him, furiously, where he’s been, he’d been waiting for him.

 

***

 

Steve’s dad was tall. Bucky and Steve know this because there’s a photo of him on the wall.

 

***

 

Bucky knows Steve’s body better than his own because they didn’t have a mirror when he was little (just a small one to look at your face in, and he couldn’t even reach it until he was 10) so he and Steve did their best to measure themselves against each other, to see if they were normal. Sure, you could catch glimpses of other guys at school, but unless you wanted to get your nose punched in for the third time in two weeks you tried not to, and so the only way for it was this.

Bucky knows what age he was when he was taller than Steve at last because they were always measuring. And yeah, somewhere in that old apartment there are the marks they made on the wall, painted over now (or maybe not) but they were always doing it - lying down on the floor next to each other, slumped together on the couch, hugging each other in winter when the windows wouldn’t keep out the wind and Steve couldn’t stop shivering, or just kicking each other under the table as Bucky’s mother handed out plates of boiled potato and beef hash.

Bucky knows Steve’s body better than his own, as if it’s his own, and he supposes that’s his problem, because in the end it turns out it doesn’t even belong to Steve, not even a little bit.

 

***

 

“What did they do to you?” he asks Steve, the evening after they get back to camp and three nights after his life went to hell.

Bucky had tried asking him earlier, but Steve had frantically widened his eyes and said “Bucky, you know they make you train when you join the army,” and then walked away to talk to Agent Carter, leaving Bucky with a handful of men who wanted to talk about their glorious escape while Bucky couldn’t stop thinking about his back on the gurney, and the look on Steve’s face when he’d found him there.

But they're finally alone, in private quarters, and Steve has to tell him now, because Steve doesn’t lie to him.

“They enlisted me,” Steve says, slowly, “and asked me to take part in an... experimental training program.”

He winces as he says the words.

“Fuck,” Bucky says, and he can’t even look at Steve. “An experiment? Medical? How much did they pay you?” He can feel his voice crack. “Was the job you had not enough?”  
  
“No, Bucky, come on, it’s not like that,” Steve says, miserable.

“What?” Bucky says, “you didn’t let them do this for free, did you?”

“You don’t understand, Buck,” Steve says, and he looks at his weird big new hands. “I needed to do something. And this way I can.”

“I don’t understand?” Bucky says, his hands over his eyes. “The hell I don’t, Steve. I left you at home, where you were - safe - and then I find out you’re so desperate to come to the front and get yourself killed that you let them do whatever they wanted to you.”

“I’m useful now,” Steve says.

“People aren’t useful,” Bucky says, furiously. “People are people. But if you’re going to - you were of plenty use selling people their pills and asthma cigarettes back home.” He starts to unlace his boot, and his fingers fumble. He tries again and he can’t - he can’t get his fingers to move properly. He pulls at the boot furiously and it doesn’t budge.

“Hey,” Steve says, and crouches down next to him. He uses his new hands to slowly untie Bucky’s laces, and he pulls the boots off, lightly brushing one hand against Bucky’s ankle. Bucky shivers and scowls but doesn’t say anything. It’s good to be rid of them. He can, at least, pull his socks off himself. They’re scratchy wool and there are holes in the heels, and there’s some blood on them and inside his boots too.

Bucky starts to take off his shirt without thinking because it’s Steve and Steve knows him better than anybody, and Steve’s seen him naked and half-clothed whichever which way, and he’s so, so tired. “Bucky,” Steve says, though, when he’s half out of his shirt, and Bucky looks down to see bruising all down his arm and his side. And yes, this makes sense. He understands some of how he feels, now. He didn’t before.

“I got to come and save you,” Steve says, and he can’t take his eyes away. “What did they - “

“It’s war, Steve,” Bucky says, “you can’t save me.”

“The hell I can’t,” Steve says, and he’s so angry. “You can’t just tell me to stay at home and wait the war out. I’m not a child, Bucky.”

Bucky thinks to hell with it, and he strips down and changes into clothes he can sleep in.

Neither of them speaks. Steve turns around and changes, too. Bucky doesn’t look.

Steve sits down at the foot of the bed, and Bucky is under the covers. He’s heard talk between Steve and Agent Carter and some of the other men, and he knows that they’re probably going to be moved around soon, but he hurts all over and he can’t stop hurting every time he looks at Steve or every time he looks away.

He wants to say, “I’m cold,” but he also doesn’t. He wants to say, “can you stay here tonight?” because nobody will notice and anyway, Bucky is - he is fucked and he could do with the company rather than anything else, and he’s pretty sure that what happened to him counts as torture and he can’t face either being alone or in a room full of men but he is scared that Steve will stay or that Steve will go and he can barely breathe because he doesn’t want anything, he wants nothing, but he doesn’t want to be left with nothing.

“What did they do to you,” Steve says, and Bucky could laugh, because it’s that question again. He lifts his arm and along with the deep bruises there are little flecks of dark red. Steve is only inches away, but it’s becoming easier not to look at him now.

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, and that’s the answer that he’s been dreading from Steve and it’s the answer he dreads from himself too, but it’s the only one he has, and he can’t even just look at his body next to Steve’s and work it out that way, work out how it’s changed, because Steve has changed more than he has and he doesn’t know him anymore, doesn’t know how exactly his arms fit alongside his own, or how much of his hands Steve’s take up when they press them palm-to-palm.

Steve sits next to him for a long time and doesn’t say anything. He starts to move - Bucky’s not sure if he’s going away or if he’s about to move closer, but he doesn’t risk it anyway and he grabs Steve’s wrist. “You should see a doctor,” Steve starts, and he doesn’t meet Bucky’s eyes, but he doesn’t move away or break Bucky’s loose grip either.

“Please,” Bucky says, and he guesses he has decided that he wants something after all - just to sleep, just to share a bed again - and the door is locked and it’s not like - it’s not like he’s asking Steve for anything too bad. The bed can barely hold them both - not with Steve’s new shoulders - but they shift around and Bucky keeps his back to him but he’s warm and he can hear him breathe and he breathes good, he breathes so much better than Bucky can ever remember, but what if it doesn’t last.

Steve runs his hand over the back of Bucky’s head and through his hair, and he says “I thought I’d never see you again,” and Bucky thinks, dully, that he’d thought the same thing.

 

***

 

Bucky’s family spent so much of their lives on getting out of Europe and into New York, but they keep going back there to die.

His mother died her first winter back in Ireland, and Bucky didn’t even get the letter until the spring.

Bucky survives his first winter in Europe, but he’s not so sure about the second.

 

***

 

Bucky doesn’t start fights, but he ends them enough that it doesn’t really matter. He’s got bruises all down his leg and ribs from where Jimmy Fisher pushed him into a fire hydrant, but Bucky’s strong and fast and it doesn’t matter.

Bucky could have been called Jimmy if something had gone wrong, if he hadn’t already had a cousin called Jimmy who’d gone and got himself killed in a strike the year that Bucky turned two. He’s glad he’s not called that. He spits a small amount of blood and dirt and smiles, his fists steady, and whoever it is who’s started the fight lets him make sure it ends as he wants it to.

His mother sighs and passes him a wet cloth and his father doesn’t notice, and he doesn’t say anything because there’s nothing to say. It’s not much of a price to pay. Steve is alright, and he only has bruises on his cheek, and Bucky is happy to stand between Steve and whatever else is going on because there’s nothing else for him to do for Steve and Steve doesn’t start the fights either but he’ll end them if he has to, and Bucky doesn’t want him to have to, because Steve ending a fight is Steve on the floor, and Bucky ending a fight is Bucky getting up and dodging a punch and kicking Jimmy or whoever all the way to Queens, so help him, he’ll do it.

The day he’s thrown onto broken glass is the worst, and that time he doesn’t get to end the fight, but none of it seems to go too deep. Steve sits with him and gets the glass out of his back while Bucky clutches his arm and bleeds, and then Steve takes him back to his empty apartment and washes the cuts for him, slowly. Bucky lies on his front on Steve’s couch, and he sweats and sticks to the cushions. He is thirteen, and he can’t remember crying in front of Steve before.

Steve’s mother comes home and finds them like that, and she doesn’t say anything but she takes over from Steve. She rubs something into Bucky’s back, and it stings, and it’s a good thing it’s summer because Bucky’s shirt is ripped to hell and he has to walk the three blocks home without it. He lies on his front that night again and sweats some more, and he can’t sleep like that but he can’t move either. It’s hot, and his parents are in the kitchen, arguing.

The next day is Saturday, and he can’t bear to get up.

His mother brings him a bowl of oatmeal, and she curses like he’s never heard her before when she sees his back, but she cleans it again for him and sends Steve away when he comes to the door.

 

***

 

“I didn’t ask for you to do this,” Steve says, as he cleans Bucky’s back, a few minutes before Steve’s mother will come in and take over. And no, this, this is the most offended Bucky has ever been, because he knows, and nobody needs to tell him what he should or shouldn’t do because he knows, he’s always known.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Bucky says, glumly, except he did and he would again and it’s not like he chose to be strong and for Steve to be ill, but his body doesn’t belong to him and Steve’s body doesn’t just belong to Steve, and Steve rubs at his back and it’s not all a disaster, it’s really not.

 

***

 

When Bucky’s war comes in, he waits until he’s drafted. It doesn’t take long. “What’s the rush?” he says, and Steve can’t find the words but Bucky saw his father go off to war desperate to die and he’s not ready for that, yet. He doesn’t start fights, not even now, not even this one.

He knows that if he signs up then Steve will follow him, and he’s never gone anywhere that Steve can’t follow before (just some dates that he does his best to turn into double dates, dancing while Steve leans against the wall, but there’s nobody there with ammunition or a form to say that he’s unfit and at the end of the night they go home together), and he knows that Steve already got turned down in the first week they were at war but once Bucky’s going, he won’t give up until they’re sending him away too.

And every time Steve says that there are men dying in the war and he has no right not do the same, Bucky says, “Going to war to fight and going to war to die are two different things.” But again, again, they’re knocking up against their fathers and the pictures that had been on Steve’s mother’s walls and the half-rusted guns wrapped up in towels that Bucky’s dad had kept in the closet.

Steve thinks it’s selfish not to fight, but Steve doesn’t remember his father and Bucky remembers his, and he’s not sure what selfish has to do with fighting or not fighting but wanting to fight too much is a sickness that he’s spent a lot of his life escaping, even when everybody else thought he’d been born to it.

Steve wants to live up to his father, and Bucky hopes he doesn’t live up to his, but they both died in war on another continent far from home, and Bucky’s not under any illusions about his own fate but he thinks that Steve is about his.

He hopes he is, anyway.

 

***

 

Bucky comes home from training and he’s bruised in ways he hadn’t been able to imagine before, and he’s got dirt everywhere, and when he lets himself into the apartment Steve is there, breathing slowly out of the open window.

“Jesus, Steve,” Bucky says, and Steve manages to smile at him before the coughing starts again.

 

***

 

“I’m useful now,” Steve says, and what he means is that his lungs and chest and heart are so much stronger than they were before, that he has muscle, and he’s reached the height that maybe he would have reached if he’d never got sick or gone hungry. He means “I’m healthy,” he means, “I could have just died anyway, at least this way I get to do it standing,” but Bucky looks at him and he doesn’t see Steve, although he does — but what they’ve done to him.

Bucky feels awful, and he’s glad that Steve’s happier, and he knows that Steve prefers the way people treat him now (for the most part) but none of them even know him, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do with himself about that, but he doesn’t ask Steve to sleep near him anymore.

Steve still sleeps nearby when he can though, because everything has changed but that hasn’t.

 

***

 

One of the first times Bucky manages to get Steve to come out dancing with him and a couple of girls he persuaded to come on a double date, he turns around during the third dance to smile at Steve (who had, last he’d seen, been standing on the other side of the room), and Steve’s gone and his date’s dancing close with another guy.

He looks around for him in case he’s gone to get a drink (it’s a cheap bar), but he’s not there, and when Bucky excuses himself to go to the bathroom after the next song he’s not in there, either.

Bucky’s date’s parents are visiting family so she takes him home, but once he takes his shirt off and she sees the scars on his back she kicks him out. She’s a nice girl, and Bucky’s not nice. He walks home with his jacket slung over his shoulder and his tie loose, and it’s not until he gets back home and Steve looks at him that he notices that the buttons are done up all wrong.

He doesn’t take his shirt off around other people after that, if he can help it.

 

***

 

The evening after Bucky gets back from training, they’re peeling potatoes and arguing about Steve’s third attempt to join the army (4F, again) when Steve says “What makes you sure it’s so safe here? They’re bombing London.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, “and where are they gonna launch bombers from to hit New York? Pennsylvania?”

Steve laughs ruefully and wipes his hands.

“Imagine Brooklyn in blackout,” Bucky says, and Steve shakes his head, because he can’t, neither of them can.

 

***

 

Bucky raises a glass to Steve, and Steve raises his too, with a wry look. “It doesn’t do anything, you know. Not anymore.” He takes a sip and pulls a face as it goes down.

The rest of the Commandos are drinking and dancing and being rude to each other on the other side of the bar.

Bucky is appalled. “What did they _do_ to you?” he asks.

He downs the last of his own whisky and gets another, and then another, and it doesn’t do anything for him either, but he doesn’t tell that to Steve.

They’re the last ones left. Bucky doesn’t sleep so well now, and Steve doesn’t need much. They go back to Bucky’s room on the base - they’re shipping out for a mission in northern France tomorrow, but for tonight they have rooms and beds and dry socks - and Bucky can’t kick Steve out but can’t do anything else either, and he really can’t ask him to stay, and Steve laces his hand into a bit of Bucky’s hair over a tender patch of scalp, on the left hand side, and Bucky winces but then before Steve can pull away he kisses him, and Steve kisses him back, and it solves nothing, and they do it anyway.

It’s been so long since the last time they did this that Bucky had almost forgotten, had wondered if he’d imagined it, but he hadn’t, he knows the way Steve’s mouth opens and moves, still clumsily even after all of it, and he rubs his thumb under Steve’s jaw and it’s unfamiliar and his eyes are firmly closed but he doesn’t stop.

And he’s seen the way Agent Carter looks at Steve and he’s pretty sure he’s seen the way he looks at her, but she was there, wasn’t she, and she let them do this, she did this, and Bucky doesn’t deserve Steve but he’s sure as hell that nobody who did this to him does either, and he knows Steve best and loves him best, even like this, and he thinks, he’ll be so happy, he’ll do his best to be happy for Steve if he can know him like this just for a small while longer.

 

***

 

The time he gets home with his shirt buttoned up wrong, Steve looks at him sideways, a slight frown between his eyebrows.

“What?” Bucky asks, jaw slightly raised.

“Nothing,” Steve says, and shakes his head.  “Be careful.”

And Bucky’s offended, because why do people think they need to tell him these things? “Nothing happened,” he says, and his shoulders sag, and he’d throw the jacket to the floor but instead he hangs it up and smooths down the lapels because it’s the only one he’s got.

“Yeah, sure,” Steve says, and snorts. He’s looking at his hands.

Bucky’s changing out of his good shirt, and he snorts back. “Got one look at the scars on my back and decided I was no good. She’s cleverer than we thought.” He pauses. “Cleverer than you are.”

And Steve looks up at him, the frown gone and he looks dumbstruck, with Os for eyes. “Hey, it’s not so bad,” Bucky says. “It’s warm out.”

The four steps Steve walks to get to Bucky take forever. Bucky’s between shirts, and Steve looks at his back, and runs his knuckle along some of the scars, and then Bucky turns around, slowly, and they stare at each other until they both feel uncomfortable, and it’s only then that Steve raises a hand and rests it on the nape of Bucky’s neck. Bucky’s shaking. "She's even dumber than you are," Steve says.

“Steve, you better not be pitying me, I still got forty pounds on you,” Bucky says, and then he kisses him, and Steve doesn’t push him off, and when he runs a hand over his back Bucky doesn’t wince away, but yes, he doesn’t take his shirt off around other people after that.

 

***

 

“Europe’s a lot different than I thought,” Steve says, the morning after neither of them got drunk but Bucky at least pretended to.

“What?” Bucky says, as he ties up his boots.

“It’s full of Americans,” Steve says, and grins at him.

 

***

 

And of course, neither of them knows when it’s the last time they’re together, because it’s unfathomable even then, and over drinks Bucky jokes with Steve about Peggy and Steve brushes his foot against his leg, and it hurts Bucky to look at him as much as it hurts him to look away, and he knows he’s probably not going home now that there’s nobody to go back for, and that he was never going home anyway because he doesn’t know what they did to him but it’s nothing good, but if he got the chance he thinks, he thinks he’d do what his father couldn’t and get the hell out, and stay out, but then, that’s probably what his father would have said too, if you’d asked him.

 

***

  
“What have they done to you?” Steve asked Bucky as he took the glass out of his back, and Bucky held onto him because he didn’t care, it had happened anyway, but Steve was here and that was okay, that was great, that was what it had all been for.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> so this is kind of a sequel (but not really) to [1943 in film](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1420498), so if you like this then you might also like that. it's similarly miserable.
> 
> come and say hello on [tumblr](http://alwaysalreadyangry.tumblr.com) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/tambourine) if you do that sort of thing.
> 
> title taken from the song by the knife because i am a monster.


End file.
